Andrew Doran
Andrew Doran
Andrew Doran
I write here in order to work things out and understand myself better. I write here in order to put things down that I have been carrying around in my head, so I don’t need to carry them around anymore. I write here in order to capture a moment and have something that I can look back on, remembering what I thought and felt at the time.
Latest Posts
Adding email links to the bottom of each blog post is paying off. Someone emailed me with information about a problem with my indoor cycling trainer. With permission, I’ve updated the post so that anyone searching for the same issue can...
February already. Can you believe it1? Although the month has changed, the weather has not, and it feels like an endurance test that is starting to get to me. It seems that it is always raining (and apparently, it is), with any glimpse...
I love that The Guardian has this as their main story on their homepage. There are so many newsletters that I would pay to subscribe to, if they weren’t hosted on Substack. The intent of the USA’s Section 230 was to allow them to refuse...
Pocket Casts’ AI-generated transcript of the Quiet Riot podcast thinks that Ryan just needs to shush.
Mark Kermode’s review of Melania (2026) is so good, and everything I expected it to be.
At a local car park. It’s good to differentiate your pricing. Someone printed this and thought “Yeah, that’s great.” This felt like another tough week. At the start, I was feeling run down, which I think was an after-effect of Saturday’s...
Just been to a preview of the new Jeff Buckley documentary, It’s Never Over (2025), followed by a Q&A with director Amy Berg. It’s a beautiful film and it was a wonderful evening. Berg asked who remembered being around when Buckley...
I’ve just finished reading Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece. This book covers a lot of ground, including plenty of detail on the philosophy behind the Micro.blog platform, as well as broader IndieWeb thinking more generally. Reading...
Cyclists gathered in the early morning, getting ready to set off on the 209km Willy Warmer Audax ride. My group wouldn’t be back until well after dark. In retrospect, the first two weeks of January were a honeymoon period after the...
Earth-Moon Connexions by El Anatsui, on display at the Tate Modern in London. I really enjoyed this week. A couple of projects came to a conclusion, something that is usually anticipated long in advance but never fails to feel like a...
Buying something from the Decathlon website and reached the checkout stage. My inside voice reads this as completely sarcastic.
Early morning moon over Berkhamsted. After three weeks off, waking up just after 6am for five days in a row was a shock to the system. On Saturday I woke up when my wife brought up a cup of tea and then promptly fell back to sleep, not...
We had a dusting of snow that seemed to be completely localised to Berkhamsted. Just enough for the kids in the street to get out on their sledges and whizz down our street. On Wednesday I turned 49. One of the fun things about being...
Interesting to see this in the notes for the FT’s News Briefing podcast. Is 2026 the year where we start to see messages like this everywhere?
Finished reading Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov. Published in 1975 in West Germany, it is the story of the closure of a Soviet prison camp in the late 1950s, told from the perspective of one of the camp’s guard dogs. The foreword to...